Something Something Editing

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Phoebe 60218 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F04%2F08%2Fsomething-something-editing%2FSomething+Something+Editing2011-04-08+07%3A03%3A21Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D602

I wasn’t going to do this post, because I feel a little stupid talking about editing. For one thing, even though this is the fifth book I’ve written, I really only feel like I’ve started to figure out how to actually edit effectively very recently. And because the process is new to me, I can’t be sure that I’m really doing it right. It also feels somehow presumptuous, talking about one’s editing process. I’m not sure that what works for me is likely to work for anyone else, and so please don’t even pretend that this is advice; really, it’s just rambling.

But Pat said he wanted to read a post on this. So Pat, this goes out to you.

A bit of history: of the five books I’ve drafted, I didn’t even bother so much as copy-editing the first two. They felt just too messy, too sprawling, too unfocused, too insurmountable. With these two books, I was really just figuring out what it meant to write a book and how to manage the actual process of writing. These were “practice books” in the truest sense of the phrase. And that’s okay.

I tried querying book 3, which I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2009. I knew this meant that the book needed to be strong, so I did a pretty thorough line editing and rewrote a few scenes.

Now, keep in mind that I know how to line edit. I’ve taught composition classes and have pretty extensive experience editing poetry, and most poetry can be fixed with some line editing and light reconceptualizing.

But a novel is not a poem. I didn’t realize that. Stupidly, because I rewrote a few scenes, I thought I was editing. I didn’t query this book terribly widely, and didn’t do very well in querying. I didn’t care too much about it–wasn’t emotionally engaged–and so, at the time, I never looked at it very closely to figure out what wasn’t working there.

(I took a look at it recently, and I could tell you exactly what was wrong with it: there were quite a few nice scenes, and the prose was good, but the plotting was scattered and unfocused, and the pacing very often wrong. But I’m not sure I would have realized that then.)

Now, I actually really liked book 4. I drafted it very cleanly. I repeated the line editing/minor scene reworking that I did on book 3. I sent it to betas with the (really stupid) message that I didn’t want to make any major changes. And I didn’t really understand why I didn’t have more success with it.

So what changed between this book and the last one? For one thing, I’m now a member of a critique group. They’ve been with me at every stage of the journey, looking at chapters, talking themes, helping me practice things like pitches and lending a hand at tightening my query. Through these interactions, I started looking at my book as a sort of collaborative work. Really, I have Interrobang Sean to thank for this. For such a young dude, he has a really healthy attitude towards feedback. He told me one day that he decided he would treat all critical feedback as potentially valid, because as nice as praise felt, it really does nothing to help one’s book. And he was in it for good books, not praise.

So I decided I’d give that a try. Rather than writing a book that was good enough to garner compliments, I decided to write the best possible book I could. I decided to excise my ego from the process. Before, when I edited, I often left sections in that I knew felt clunky or baggy, hoping that my prose was good enough that readers wouldn’t notice.

No such thing as “good enough” this round–but more on that later.

The second thing that really impacted my editing process was that I read this book, Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Now keep in mind that I’m often somewhat skeptical of books about writing. They tend to be either indulgent and impractical (if sometimes entertaining; Stephen King’s On Writing is one of those), or they rely on the kind of preplanning of which I’m completely incapable. Essentially, anything that requires formulae (I’m looking at you, Blake Snyder), outlines, or notecards for prewriting has pretty much lost me as an audience, because I’m capricious and easily bored, and if I’m not working on the actual stuff of writing–you know, messing about in my actual manuscript–I’m likely to just never actually write at all.

But Kress’s book is different. She talks about fiction in a way that’s completely common-sensical, perceptive, and, above all, intuitive. She discusses the implicit promises a book makes, and the various ways to fulfill those promises. She talks about engaging the reader via credible prose at the outset and then discusses how to keep that reader engaged through rising tensions through the middle. She discusses the differences between literary and genre endings. Basically, she points out a bunch of stuff that’s so right that it seems like it should be intuitive, but isn’t.

She also suggests rewriting your beginning when you’re fairly well through writing the first draft of your book. When you’re drafting, she says, you can’t really know the implicit promises that your story is supposed to make. You figure it out in the writing–and then go back and fix the opening so that it fits (time travel; it’s the magic of revision! And no one ever has to know).

I decided to try her advice. Three quarters of my way through the book, I stopped, and rewrote the first ten thousand words or so. And holy shit, the beginning of my book was better. Not perfect, but it more clearly introduced the conflicts of the book, as well as the primary character tensions, right from the first page. It introduced theme and made all of those implicit promises that I hope the rest of my book ends up paying out on.

Now I’ve finished the draft and I’m editing. I’m doing something akin to Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Manuscript Revision, but just a little looser. I don’t have a notebook with my themes and sub-themes, character arcs or blurbs written down, but that’s mostly because, as I said above, I find that kind of exercise just really boring, but also because I figured all of that out with my critique group awhile ago (if you want a two-sentence statement of my main character’s primary conflict, just ask!).

I’ve already done one complete read-through at this point. I noticed early that my narrator’s voice lapses in spots, so I knew I’d be in for a pretty thorough edit on the line-level. I made a few decisions about scenes that needed to be moved, aspects of the timeline that needed altering, and plot lines that needed to be more clearly foreshadowed or better developed or resolved. I waited to hear back from a few betas, absorbed their thoughts on the book, and discussed the book with them, then ran these preliminary changes by them, as well. Comfortingly, we’ve all been pretty much on the same page.

So now I’m at the manuscript slog. I ordered a bound copy of my manuscript from Office Depot (because looseleaf is messy and inefficient) and I’m going through page-by-page and marking up every single change that I want to make. And I’m being brutal with myself–not settling for a single instance of “good enough.” I’m adding scenes back in (written on post-its) and chopping out big chunks of text and streamlining the language and making dialogue more naturalistic (one of my weak points in drafting). I’m going over every word and making sure it’s authentic for the narrator’s voice. Did you ever get a paper back from a teacher and find it just covered in red pen? I am that teacher. I am also that student. Every single page of my book looks like this:

And I’m not going to lie. It’s completely exhausting. I find I can only get through 20-30 pages of this a day before I have to go watch some television (we’ve been watching the X-files. I <3 Spooky Mulder). But it’s also exciting. I can feel how much better the book will be, almost palpably. I can’t wait to go type all of these changes in to see how awesome it will be.

But anyway, it’s 3 a.m. and I’m a tired Phoebe now. Uh, Pat, hope that answered your questions!